I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

10 Jobs That Didn't Exist 10 Years Ago

Sustainability consultants have an average annual salary of $83,000 (indeed.com)

Employment trend watchers have been pinpointing the sectors where jobs are anticipated to increase forever—every five years the BLS projects its own outlook and sites like our list what’s become old news: that careers in a handful of sectors (most linked to technology, a growing concern about the environment and an aging population) are on the rise while others continue to falter. But are they new occupations or simply new ways of meeting existing needs?

“I don’t believe that new needs have been created,” says Charles Purdy, senior editor for Monster.com. “We’ve just created new ways and adopted new technologies to get them done.”

Still, each year as twenty-somethings leave college campuses in droves, industries on the rise offer something uniquely appealing: the opportunity to seize brand new positions where competition hasn’t reached critical mass. With that in mind, we scoured jobs data and career sites for the most promising positions in on-the-rise sectors that were only created in the past decade. They’re so new that they didn’t even exist a decade ago, which more than puts your parents out of the running.

App developers can expect an average salary of $93,000 (indeed)

App Developer

The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the Android shortly after. Since then, more than a million apps have been put up for sale in Apples App Store and Android’s Google Play. Consider this: in 2011, AppleApple pulled in more than $15 billion in revenues from mobile applications, which shrink programs that used to run only on desktop computers to make them work on mobile devices.

As demand surges for apps to run on iOS, Android and whatever operating system is waiting in the wings, companies are faced with a dearth of talent with the skills to develop for mobile. This means fresh opportunity for programmers and developers to break into a booming market. Currently more than 16,000 listings for mobile app developers are listed on job site indeed.com.

As customer information becomes more and more vital to the retail experience, businesses are compiling data in droves—and hiring experts to make sense of it. From different datasets including structured (transaction), semi-structured (user behavior) and unstructured (text) information, data analysts and scientists look for behavioral patterns to help retailers and businesses predict future trends or to build recommendation engines or personalized advertising.

“Library science is a really hot degree right now,” says Purdy, “And data-mining could be one of the reasons. It’s a helpful knowledge set for someone hoping to manage large amounts of data” Hopeful data-minded candidates can include library science majors, researchers, engineers or applied scientists.

When a certain set of affluent parents watch their toddler stack his or her first set of blocks, they’re not lost in a moment of cute, they’re strategizing their child’s likeliness of getting into the right pre-school. These moms and dads will stop at nothing to secure the best education for their kids—which for many includes hiring an educational or admissions consultant to help ease the process of interviewing and testing into schools from preschool to college. Admissions consultants can be paid thousands of dollars for their skills—which often include personal connections with school administrators.

Millennial Generational Expert

Generational consultants help companies better understand the changing workforce—and who better to explain the Millennials than a living, breathing member of Generation Y? Companies in every sector and of every size face the challenge of recruiting and developing young professionals to prepare them to be future executives. Companies can build loyalty in their workforce by engaging in practices that connect directly with their younger employees. All-hands happy hour, anyone?

But this isn’t a role that’s strictly for the young ones. Many generational experts are older employees, who’ve turned their experience with young people into an ability to advise companies on how best to engage, motivate and, yes, placate this often fickle workforce.

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1) “App Developer” is just short for “Application Developer”, a job that has been around for as long as I’ve been alive. iOS and Android are just new platforms and are very analogous to other closed platforms like XBox and PS3. People were using the term “App Developer” in the 90s to describe anyone who does application development as opposed to systems development.

2) UX Designer is just a rebranding of a HCI Expert. Jeff Raskin, the father of UX/HCI design, passed in 2005 and spent his whole professional career doing this sort of work with the original Macintosh being his most famous result.

I like the idea of elder care but I don’t want some young new graduate at my bedside. I hope it’s older people being hired for this position. Young people tend to bring unrealistic optimism or religious belief that only prolong the misery.

I work with sustainability programs, and I can tell you that the sustainability consultants have been called by other names prior to your 10 year time-frame, But you are correct that the emerging trend towards sustainable business is definitely an opportunity awaiting our youth and emerging leaders to drive in the coming years. It all comes down to training and sustainable education (www.universityofvermontonline.com) that will allow the movement to build into the commonplace expectation that proper accounting practices and employee benefits have become.

I hope there’s more to the concept of Chief Listening Officer waaaay beyond social media.

I continue to be impressed by the sum and power of knowledge that staff have and would like to share in organisations. And I continue to be disappointed by the lack of opportunity to share this knowledge both inside and outside organisations. Why do I come up against this mismatch so often?

In part I think it is because the further people advance up the old fashioned hirearchical org chart, the more they seem to be trained to believe the hype. Their hype and the hype of people around and often above them.

So to all you CEOs, FDs, HRDs I would like to say this. Please stop assuming that we all want to hear from you all of the time. You have two job titles. The one on your business card and this one: Chief Listening Officer. Stop broadcasting, start conversing, and be prepared to be amazed at how smart our staff and customers are.

I loved reading this. Although I have worked in the tech industry for the better part of my career, I never dreamed 10 years ago that, in 2012, I would be the owner of a cloud hosting company. Back in 2002, a cloud delivered rain, not apps. Today, the possibilities are endless. I am excited about what’s in store for my young children. It is entirely likely that their dream occupations have yet to be invented. – Laurie Head, AIS Network, http:www.aisn.net

I know that probably this is not the best forum for me to talk about this but I am suffocating.I earned a bachelors degree in Foods,nutrition and dietetics two years ago from a public university in Kenya.I have been tarmacking for these last two years with no hope at all.I would love to kick-start my career or get funding to start a hotel or another venture where i would be able to practice my expertise. If there is anybody out there who can help me please do and God will greatly reward you. I could use a job or a loan that will be paid back on your terms and any time you want. Besides,Kenyan money is a bit valueless as $25,000 is equal to one million here. I hope any one can answer my plea.My email address is ngugievelyne@gmail.com and it is also my PayPal email. Hoping to hear from you soon if you understand my plight.Thanks.